INTRODUCTION

This chapter seeks to question and clarify the role of knowledge about language (KAL) in second language teacher education (SLTE). It has long been assumed that SLTE programs should provide teachers with information about language and language learning, and traditionally this has been accomplished through courses on applied linguistics and Second Language Acquisition (SLA). However, research on actual use of KAL has consistently found that L2 teachers either do not or have great difficulty using KAL gained in SLTE programs for their teaching (e.g., Andrews 1997, 1999, 2003; Morris 1999, 2002; Pennington and Richards 1997). This chapter will explain why teachers find it so difficult to use academic KAL for teaching and will discuss what SLTE programs can do to provide their students with KAL, which can more easily be used for teaching.

SCOPE AND DEFINITIONS

The term KAL, as used here, is a very broad category covering any kind of knowledge about language including not only grammar and orthography, but also knowledge of language modes (speaking, listening, writing, reading), how language is used (e.g., pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistic variation, etc.), and language learning (including ways of L2 language teaching based on conceptions of language such as communicative language teaching, task-based teaching, process writing, etc.). KAL, however, does not refer to the internalized knowledge used to actually produce and comprehend language.

CURRENT APPROACHES

In contemporary beliefs (or folk theories) about L2 teachers’ use of KAL, teachers are thought to consider all the explicit information they know relevant to a situation, use general rules or knowledge to calculate the validity of a range of possible options for a specific situation, and chose the option with the best evidence supporting it (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford 1997; Widdowson 1990). In contrast, empirical theories of cognition suggest that cognition is maximized by reducing the amount of information we process explicitly (e.g., Anderson 1993; Ericcson and Lehman 1996). In order to explicitly figure something out (e.g., the ways in which a student utterance deviates from the target dialect of the language the student is learning), we need to do that in working memory (Kirschner 2002).